Simulation study of wheels wear in low-floor tram with independently rotating wheels

This paper presents an example of low-floor trams simulation tests. The tram under study was unique because of using the system of independently rotating wheels in the bogie IRW (Chudzikiewicz et al., in: The structural design of a modern, completely low-floor tram with independently rotating wheels (Report in Polish) NCBiR-DEMONSTRATOR+, Warsaw University of Technology Faculty of Transport-PESA Bydgoszcz, 2014). In this paper, the dynamic behavior of the vehicle was examined, and the phenomenon of wheels and rails wear, during the rolling contact, was subjected to the identification. For this purpose, a dedicated computational model was built in MATLAB environment, taking into account the phenomenon of kinematic pair wear using Archard's model.